Volume 37, Number 17 · November 8, 1990
A Phony Ancestor
By Lord Zuckerman
Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery
by Frank Spencer
Oxford University Press, 272 pp., $24.95
The Piltdown Papers, 1908–1955: The Correspondence and Other Documents Relating to the Piltdown Forgery
by Frank Spencer
Oxford University Press, 282 pp., $59.95
Today there is little argument about our ability to trace the broad lines of man's fossil history for some half million years and, controversially, even for two to three million years, almost to the beginning of what is called the Quaternary geological period, of which the last fifteen thousand years are styled the Holocene or Recent epoch. The major part of the Quaternary, known as the Pleistocene, comprised four ice ages, during which the Arctic ice cap extended across, and then receded from, a large part of the northern hemisphere. The most recent ice age reached its zenith some twenty thousand years ago, when ice covered the northern parts of the Eurasiatic continent—extending over the British Isles and into France and Germany, as well as over enormous areas of the North American continent. It is only some fifteen thousand years ago that the ice started to recede, while still leaving the better part of Greenland uninhabitable under thousands of feet of ice, as were many other parts of the land that glaciers had previously covered, and by whose weight and movement it was transformed.
Review, 4985 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |